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Toronto gets a double dose of The National

The Brooklyn indie-rock band plays three sold-out shows at Massey Hall, just as their unusual documentary Mistaken for Strangers opens at the Bloor Cinema.

Tom Berninger (left) got fired from his job as a roadie on tour with brother Matt's band, the National, but came away with an acclaimed underdog documentary in Mistaken For Strangers. (Deirdre O'Callaghan)

Toronto gets to see a lot of The National this week, perhaps even a little more than it bargained for.

The Brooklyn-based indie-rock quintet sets up shop at Massey Hall on Wednesday evening for the first of three consecutive, sold-out shows at the venue, the site of two reputation-solidifying gigs on its breakthrough High Violet tour back in the spring of 2010.

Prior to the Thursday gig, however, the band will also be on hand to launch a week-long engagement in another local venue when its acclaimed (sorta-) tour documentary, Mistaken For Strangers, opens at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

The latter is notable for featuring very little actual footage of the National on the road and for dwelling instead — often agonizingly so — on the backstage misadventures of frontman Matt Berninger’s younger brother, Tom, who briefly accompanied the band on the High Violet tour during a disastrously short-lived stint as a roadie.

Tom tagged along with the band — notable for being composed of two other sets of brothers in Aaron and Bryce Desser and Bryan and Scott Devendorf — with a camera in hand, not entirely sure what would come of the candid footage, performance material and absurdist interviews he grabbed along the way. The material he got wound up lending itself more to an incredibly funny, but also disarmingly honest and open-hearted film about his own quest for self-actualization and the little-addressed predicament of what it means to be the “other” sibling living in the shadow of a rock star. Which is, truth be told, something people rarely think about.

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“Nobody does, that’s why I had to make a film about it,” laughs Tom, 34, from Brooklyn, where he’s currently living in brother Matt’s garage and cutting bonus footage for the Mistaken For Strangers DVD release. “But there was never a documentary intended in the early, early stages. I needed a job. I was in between jobs, living in Cincinnati. I needed work, so my brother hired me as a roadie for me to get a paycheque and I brought a camera along. I was really just excited to maybe be a videographer or maybe do a little tour diary about being on tour with the National.”

As Tom puts it, “We really didn’t discover the movie until the editing room,” when he relocated from temporary residence in his parents’ basement in Cincinnati after getting fired (onscreen, no less) mid-tour from the National’s crew in an effort to salvage the scattered material he’d accumulated. With Matt’s wife, Carin Besser, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, looking over his shoulder, it became clear that the real story lurking amidst the randomness was his, warts and all.

“I just want to clarify: when Tom says ‘the editing room,’ that was my daughter’s playroom,” interjects Matt. “It wasn’t like we were at Skywalker Ranch working on this thing.”

“We started seeing what the movie could be about — which is about me — after Carin saw some of the really weird stuff, like me crying and me drunk on the bus. But it was a really hard movie to make. And it took a while to make my weird, stupid questions actually work,” says Tom. “This was my life, and if people didn’t like my movie it meant they almost didn’t like my life, which meant they didn’t like me . . . I’m proud that I gambled on myself. But it’s weird. It’s certainly a weird time in my life. It’s getting weirder.”

For elder brother and “alpha male” Berninger, who also lays himself fairly bare in the film, seeing how devastatingly honest and vulnerable Tom was willing to appear onscreen made him, in turn, “totally happy and willing to let them show me in not such a guarded way and just dig into the family dynamics and stuff.”

“It was a risk, I guess, but Tom was the one who was risking the most,” he says. “The truth is, after Tom was fired, I didn’t want him to go back to Cincinnati and fall back into the same rut he was in.”

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